Tolstoy’s observation about the bland similarities between happy families and the stark differences between unhappy families might have been a bit overused lately. But it’s hard to resist unpacking it again as two contrasting family dramas play out in sacred spaces across town.

Over at Espace Knox, Infinithéâtre’s splendid converted-church venue in N.D.G., Alyson Grant’s new play Conversion (playing to Feb. 25) sets the family dinner table for four. Then it sets the plates spinning: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, interracial marriage, abortion, adultery. …

You can’t fault Grant for the fearless scope of her ambition in this story of a poisonous matriarch drunkenly upsetting every liberal principle over dinner. The model is clearly one of those great drink-sodden dramas from the likes of O’Neill and Albee. But those playwrights revealed their secrets during long journeys into night. Conversion comes in at a brisk 90 minutes, and things get mighty crowded and muddled very quickly.

That, though, is the least of its problems. The most glaring of them is Diana Fajrajsl’s performance as the alcohol-fueled Mary. Director Guy Sprung bafflingly allows her to deliver every line in an over-enunciated, artificial cadence. You can sense what he’s after: the creation of an iconic monster towering over the stage. But pitched somewhere between a Bette Davis caricature and the Wicked Witch of the West, her delivery sucks all the air out of every dramatic confrontation and comic one-liner.

Timothy Hine seems adrift in his own painfully stilted performance as Joseph, Mary’s gentle soul of a husband. (“Gentle” is of course relative. At one tone-deaf-to-the-times moment, he clouts Mary across the face, seemingly because, well, she asks for it.)

Denise Watt and Mike Payette, as younger couple Abi and Al, also spend much of the time struggling to react convincingly to whatever Fajrajsl is doing. They fare better in a couple of intimate, well-paced scenes together. As the bewildered Al and Abi try to come to terms with a seismic shift in their lives, there’s the hint of a far more interesting and heartfelt play.

Mostly though — and it pains me to say it as one who enjoyed Grant and Sprung’s last collaboration, the supernatural hospital-set farce Progress! — this is an overcooked disaster.

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Meanwhile, over at Westmount Park United Church, the Oedipus family are unhappy in their own queasy way in Antigone (playing to Feb. 17). The late Oedipus’s daughter (and sister) is looking to bury her brother (and uncle) who was killed while taking up arms against King Creon (her uncle and … it’s complicated).

Sophocles’s great play about the deadly gulf between loyalty to the state and to family is both blessed and cursed by the high passions and ultra-traditionalism of independent company Raise the Stakes Theatre’s production.

The togas, breastplates and plumed helmets have a faintly silly pop-up store feel to them. Yet it’s thrilling to see the pagan ritualism of the play unencumbered with modernizing fads, and staged, with considerable imagination by director Anton Golikov, in front of the church’s altar and up and down its aisles.

And if the broiling intensity of the playing — Maxime Paradis’s Creon and Alison Louder’s Antigone leading a 15-strong cast — sometimes lacks subtlety and variation, it does make for a thundering gallop through the gnarled thickets of this near-2,500-year-old play.

Live music adds to the immersive feel, and there’s an especially effective final stretch in which Antonio Bavaro (of local drag legends House of Laureen) pulls out all stops for a spooky, ash-hurling portrayal of Tiresias, the gender-fluid seer who predicts things are going to end badly for this family with uniquely bad beginnings.

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